Coordination Team

Professor Philip Steinberg, Professor of Political Geography & Director of IBRU, Durham University. Phil has written extensively on the history of the law of the sea and its development in the context of regional and global uses and perceptions of maritime space. He has published widely on this topic and in related areas of communications law and Polar politics, with research being funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the European Commission, and the International Council for Canadian Studies. Prior to his position at Durham, Phil taught for sixteen years at Florida State University, punctuated by fellowships at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the University of California, Santa Cruz’ Center for Cultural Studies, the Newberry Library, the American Geographical Society Collection, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s History of Cartography Project, and the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has authored or edited six books including The Social Constructionof the Ocean (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Managing the Infosphere: Governance, Technology, and Cultural Practice in Motion, Temple University Press, 2008), What Is a City?Rethinking the Urban after Hurricane Katrina (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Contesting theArctic: Politics and Imaginaries in the Circumpolar North, IB Tauris, 2015). His most recent journal publications have been in Ocean Development & International Law, Polar Geography, Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, Harvard Design Magazine, Atlantic Studies, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie and Polar Record with recent book chapters in Polar Geopolitics? Knowledge, Resources, and LegalRegimes (Edward Elgar), Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean (Ashgate), DocumentingInternational Relations (Routledge), Cargomobilities: Moving Materials in a Global Age (Routledge), International Relations and the Arctic: Understanding Policy and Governance (Cambria), and Seascapes: Shaped by the Sea: Embodied Narratives and Fluid Geographies (Ashgate). In addition to directing the ICE LAW Project, Phil currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Political Geography and co-directs the Seabed Resource Management working group of the European Commission COST Action OceanGov (Ocean Governance for Sustainability).

Dr Kate Coddington, Lecturer, Department of Geography, Durham University. Kate received her PhD in Geography from Syracuse University in 2014 and then served through 2015 as Post-Doctoral Research Associate at IBRU, Durham University’s Centre for Borders Research. Her research focuses broadly on landscapes of protection for refugees and asylum seekers in the Asia-Pacific region. Recent work funded by the British Council explored how Thailand is coping with increasing numbers of urban asylum seekers within the context of rapidly changing regional protection strategies. This project built on past research engagements in the Asia-Pacific region, including her PhD research focused on approaches to public policy dealing with migrants and postcolonial governance in Australia’s Northern Territory that influence processes of bordering, national identity, citizenship, and belonging. She has also conducted research on migrant detention in Australia and Indonesia as part of the multi-year, collaborative Island Detention Project (PI Alison Mountz) supported by the US National Science Foundation. She has authored and co-authored publications in Geography Compass, Emotion, Space and Society,Social & Cultural Geography, Progress in Human Geography, SHIMA: The Journal of Research Into Island Cultures, and The Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, as well as several book chapters.

Ms. Eris Williams Reed, Network Facilitator, Department of Geography, Durham University. Eris is responsible for supporting the subproject leaders with their planning and facilitation of individual subproject meetings; assisting the project manager with essential administration duties related to the management of the network grant, including coordination of the network’s presence at conferences; and maintaining of the project’s website and social media presence. She is also currently completing a PhD at Durham in the Department of Classics and Ancient History on the topic of water and religious life in the Roman Near East. Despite differences in time and place, ICE LAW’s aims resonate strongly with her own research on human-environment relationships.